Reflections on Theory and Method

Abstract

The previous chapter provided an overview of our study, including a brief introduction to the main youth who participated and provided their own images and voices to the narratives that we unfold here and in the following chapters. We also sketched a preliminary outline of the socio-cultural worlds in which the young people were embedded and of the community organisations and other resources that the young people drew on for material and financial help and mentoring as they developed and practised their music skills and cultural identities. Now we focus on the central aspects of this study that involve our participatory and multilayered methodology. To do this it is necessary first that we detail both the theoretical framework and examples of the practice from our study. As indicated earlier, the project was underpinned simultaneously by Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of ‘social praxeology’, incorporating the notions of both ‘field’ and ‘habitus’ (1977, 1993), and also by a long literary history of the concept of the seriousness of play. The latter includes the work of Victor Turner (1982), Paul Willis (1990), Don Handelman (1990) and Richard Schechner (1993), their understandings of ‘serious play’ — which means that which could conceivably be real or possible in the worlds of each individual — and the concept of ‘unreal play’ or fantasy, meaning that which could not be real, such as moments of extreme exaggeration or mimetic excess.

The promise of these big ideas for those of us formally-known-as the-audience is that we will be recast as the viewers/producers of a new participatory culture. Well, what I say is: ‘Bring it on’. (Meadows, 2006, cited in Hartley, 2009, p. 125)

Self and other, subject and object are categories of thought, not concrete entities. (Hastrup, 1992, p. 117)

It’s a bit like making a Big Brother movie, isn’t it? (Vanessa, Adelaide, direct to camera, 2004)